A convenient spy : Wen Ho Lee and the politics of nuclear espionage /

A fascinating chronicle of the life and purported crimes of Wen Ho Lee, charged with giving away the US's most precious military secrets, and of the stunningly inept criminal investigation that followed. Undoubtedly, Lee was guilty of something. He copied and removed sensitive nuclear weapons data, leaving it vulnerable in numerous locations. He was evasive and failed all polygraphs. But did he knowingly give secrets to an enemy? Whether devious spy or absent-minded academic was never proven, yet seems beyond the point. This is an expose of an arrogant, quarrelsome, and incompetent government. In the absence of a Cold War-scale rival, special interests in Washington were desperate to gin up an enemy of comparable menace. China fit the necessary bill and was anointed heir apparent to the Soviet Union. It did not matter if Lee was guilty of the specific charges against him; what mattered was that the nation be galvanized to face a new threat. But justice is ill served when it is not held to the highest standards of proof. The knowledge that Lee is guilty of something is not--and should not be--enough to convict him of anything. Recommended for general readers through researchers and faculty. E. C. Dolman United States Air University

Stober, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the San JoseMercury-News, and Hoffman, who reports for the Albuquerque Journal, take a fascinating story from the newspaper headlines and expand it into the first full-length treatment of the subject. Wen Ho Lee was a weapons-code scientist employed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory when, a half-dozen years ago, he was arrested for espionage. Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan, was charged with spying for China, and he was held in detention for nine months for purportedly being a security threat to the entire U.S. weapons system. But after pleading guilty to a single count, he was released from jail with an apology for his treatment by the federal judge who heard the case. What drew Stober and Hoffman to this story--its "intriguing confluence of intelligence, weapons, science, and politics" --will also draw readers to their book. They are balanced in their assessment of this emotion-arousing affair, accusing Lee of "committing an egregious security offense," even if he didn't actually share secrets with the Chinese, but they don't let the FBI off the hook, either. The agency's sloppy investigative work led to "an ugly chapter in U.S. history . . . a time when democratic ideals were forgotten in the name of national security." Certain to be in demand and to cause heated discussions. --Brad Hooper

Like many spy stories, there's much that's unknown about the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwanese-American scientist jailed for almost a year in 1999 and 2000 on charges of spying for China before being released with the judge's apology. This exemplary investigative report by journalists Stober (a Pulitzer winner who writes for the San Jose Mercury-News) and Hoffman (of the Albuquerque Journal) goes a long way toward filling in the blanks. They first give a biographical sketch of Lee from his childhood in Taiwan to his college days, marriage and up-and-down engineering career before he arrived at New Mexico's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1978. At Los Alamos, he first built computer models of nuclear reactors before creating and maintaining the codes used by bomb designers. The authors also detail the rivalries and confusion among politicians, government investigators and agencies and media outlets exploring the case. Congress and the media, they write, "were locked in a game of one-upsmanship, describing Lee's crime in ever more superlative-laden rhetoric." The authors also show how the case against Lee intersected with the burgeoning political and scientific relationship between the United States and China during the 1980s and 1990s. The book is full of new information, and, to the authors' credit, even where they're unsure of the answer, they soberly explore all the possibilities. Agents, John Brockman, Katinka Matson. (Jan. 14) Forecast: This will run up in bookstores against Wen Ho Lee's own book, also due out in January from Hyperion (and tightly embargoed). Whether that volume spurs sales of this one or each cannibalizes the other may depend on the respective review and media attention each book receives. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In December 1999, Wen Ho Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan who worked on nuclear weapons research and development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was accused of downloading top-secret material and an open-access portion of the lab's computer network onto tapes (which he claimed he destroyed) and then handing them over to Beijing (and perhaps Taipei as well). This convoluted case wound up making Lee into a minor folk hero and leaving the federal government with egg on its face when he was set free in September 2000 after pleading guilty to a minor charge. International, domestic, and bureaucratic politics were all involved in this shadowy scenario, as were personal egos and perceptions. After completing this book by journalists Stober and Hoffman, who relied largely on unattributed interviews, readers will have to decide for themselves whether Lee was a devious spy or an eccentric victim. This title should be placed alongside Wen Ho Lee's forthcoming My Country Versus Me (Hyperion, 2002) and is suitable for public and academic libraries. Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Two journalists take the widely publicized case of accused secret agent Wen Ho Lee as an instance of lax security, bureaucratic bungling, misguided energy, and ill-served justice in America. Taiwanese immigrant Lee, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratories for two decades, had access to virtually every piece of nuclear data in the American arsenal. There's no question that Lee broke every security rule in the book: he squirreled away top-secret information, copied computer files detailing nuclear-bomb codes onto floppy disks and unsecured hard drives, and talked willingly to Chinese nuclear scientists about technologies that eventually showed up in weapons developed in the People's Republic. But was he a spy? The US government, having ferreted Lee out in a hunt that pitted agency against agency, never turned up solid evidence that he betrayed his adopted country, though investigators did find box after box of sensitive documents and data in Lee's garage and caught him in lie after lie on polygraph tests. In the end, Lee walked, despite all the efforts of an intelligence community convinced that China is likely to be America's chief enemy in years to come and despite the fact that China had been actively gathering nuclear secrets from "not only ethnic Chinese but anyone with access to science and technology information"-requisites that Lee fulfilled to the letter. The heart of the authors' text addresses the questions of why American intelligence failed, why Lee was able to gather information so freely, and why incompetence seems to run rampant at all levels of our government. Though their narrative sometimes gasps under the weight of detail, Stober (San Jose Mercury News) and Hoffman (Albuquerque Tribune) do a fine job of negotiating a path through the secretive, arrogant subcultures involved in the Lee affair: the demimondes of spies and counterspies, of federal bureaucrats, of self-serving politicians, of scientists-and of journalists. A powerful expose.